The mega-jump, however, is the biggest offender. Coins that are placed in elevated areas are a pain to reach as it is, and using your Superman-style bound-over-the-tallest-building power significantly depletes the meter you need to use the special moves – miss a jump and you'll be tricking down the rest of the mountain to fill up your juice before trying again. It's also a deceptive power; one of the final coins you'll have to collect is placed on the top of a satellite dish that you can't hit – the solution to this infuriating "puzzle" isn't combining speed and spring, rather, it's to exploit a glitch and grind up the dish.

When you've had enough of the solo suffering, though, you'll find that the multiplayer is unexpectedly entertaining. Even if the controls are funky, it’s still fun throwing snowballs at friends as you race to the finish line, try to survive lethal avalanches or rack up the most points in an allotted time. In keeping with the free-roaming motif, you're never limited to the events; all 16 players have the ability to start and join specific events as they please without ever having their game interrupted. The multiplayer seamlessly integrates with the online multiplayer, as you can still hunt out your coins, set markers for warping and accrue fat stacks of cash, all without the fear of being booted to the menu when someone drops out or hops in.

Riding down the variously decorated mountains isn't ever thrilling since there's rarely an exhilarating sense of speed, but the very nature of launching off of a ramp and perfectly landing a 720 stalefish is satisfying, especially in the middle of a heated Air Tricks multiplayer session. Seeing the snow deform in the wake of your carving (and crashing) is a minor addition that adds to the realism of the tumbling mountains, which can be seen in their entirety at all times, from any height, without a smidgen of pop-in to interfere. But problems big and small mar the overall experience and make it tough to recommend to anyone. SWS's annoying invisible walls break the illusion of an otherwise awesome go-where-you-want and do-what-you-please approach, and the actual doing what you please part is sloppily executed with controls that sometimes don't respond to your input.

It's inherently fun to do back flips and bomb down hills, but tediously walking up a mountain to line up a perfect jump to nab collectible coins (just to impress a shoddily rendered snowboardin' superstar) makes the career a worthless endeavour and a complete waste of time. Shaun White Snowboarding is still a fun game to tide you over if you've got to have your snowboarding fix, but it's hard to recommend unless you plan on spending a lot of your time online, where it's easier to simply kick back and enjoy the stunning scenery with some pals, all the while ignoring the things that annoyed you in your solo run.

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